The Learning Library is a prototype tool and is best used to explore the new media literacies through its collection. A simple authoring tool for you to add your own media and create activities is available.
We hope that the Learning Library will provide young people and
educators alike a chance to share and remix media materials of
their culture in order to learn what they need to do to become full
participants in the contemporary media landscape.
The library is our approach to practicing what we preach.
The learning library originally started with the production of short documentary segments on topics such as as cosplay, wikipedia, graffiti, dj culture, and animation. We soon realized that if we were to put our theories into practice we needed to create a more robust system for active
participation in the learning process. The result was the current
learning library where the materials we produced -- and countless
other sites of cultural production and participation which are
already in the web -- become resources for challenges which require
a mixture of exploration, experimentation, self-reflection, and
communication.
We are finding that teachers are using these challenges in a range
of different ways: some are using the challenges themselves in
order to get a better grasp on the new media literacy concepts and
practices; some are taking the challenges directly into their
classrooms; but many more are adapting them to different curricular
contexts, taking their core principles to develop their own
challenges, and in short, appropriating and remixing them for their
own ends.
The challenges are designed to be modular -- to be able to fit into
classroom and after school learning contexts or to be embraced by
home schoolers and others for self-learning. The challenges are
designed to be flexible so they can be used in a range of
disciplines with young people at different stages in development.
Many of them are designed to have low-tech variants for those
classrooms where there is no laptop per child since our emphasis is
on the skills and mental models as much as on the tools and
techniques of new media.
However, the Learning Library is not just a tool for educators. We've
tested the library with teens as young as 13 and they have found
this an easy tool to use. Teens we've worked with have embedded
media they are interested in into the library. They also have
created challenges, like this one on "How to make a podcast". We
are encouraging educators to build challenges as class projects
with their students - let them bring their expertise into the
learning process.
This website provides a lot of materials to help you get started
with the Learning Library. Whether you are a teacher, educator,
researcher, or student, browsing through the Learning Library pages
on this site will provide you with a good introduction to the
application, how to use it, and what it is for.
- To begin, you may want to check out the video Tutorials which provide detailed instructions on using and creating with the Learning Library.
- From there, you can begin exploring the many uses of the Learning
Library Application.
